


A Good Deed Gone Unnoticed

by PseudoLeigha



Series: Mary Potter Shorts/Background [12]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: AU of Mary Potter, After the third task, Canon Compliant, Kind of like 'the truth is it wasn't like that', The future is terrifying, Things Harry Potter Doesn't Know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-28
Updated: 2017-02-28
Packaged: 2018-09-27 09:54:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10002215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PseudoLeigha/pseuds/PseudoLeigha
Summary: Luna Lovegood does what she can to ensure that the future is one where she and her father and Magical Britain survive the return of the Dark Lord, which in this case is less about Wrackspurts and more about making sure Severus Snape makes it home safe. Features the White_Mage!Oracle!Scrying!Luna from Mary Potter.





	

Luna waited in the shadows by the gate, amusing herself by counting fireflies and listening to the hints of stories carried by the wind.

All was not quiet on Hogwarts’ grounds: The Minister had argued with the Headmaster in the Hospital Wing, and his denials had been caught by a faint breeze, wafting through the ward, though she hardly needed to hear them to know what had happened: She could feel the fractures in their relationship as the Minister left the grounds, fear and denial of the Thief Lord and mistrust of his old mentor and ally building into a perfect storm of paranoia at the back of his mind even as he passed her position. She wondered, briefly, whether the Headmaster knew already that the Minister was now set against him.

The Order of the Phoenix had been recalled. Luna wasn’t sure how she felt about that. She knew that her mother had been vaguely aligned with them, once upon a time, using her skills as a healer to help resist the Thief Lord. But she also knew that they had nearly lost last time. Her father had told her the truth of the First War, when she had asked about the famous boy her nearest neighbor was determined to someday marry – without Lily Potter’s sacrifice, she would have grown up in a world ruled by the Dark, for the Phoenix of the Order was only a mascot, and not any sort of commentary on the eternal or undefeatable nature of their resistance.

On the other hand, she was rather pleased to hear Sirius Black brought back into the open. She was glad he hadn’t been caught, or succumbed to the demons at the back of his mind. Her Patron did not often take an interest in the world around her, but the injustice that had been done to the Fallen Star was very great, and so Luna had been asked to play a small part in his story, the tiniest of nudges to restore a measure of Truth to the world.

The Diggorys’ mourning cries and the tears of Hufflepuff threaded through the bushes, haunting her more clearly than any of the ghosts ever had. There was nothing, she knew, that could have been done to save him. In every now-past future she had sought, he had died this night, whether by the hand of Pettigrew or his Lord or at the claws of a beast in the maze, or even, if he could have been convinced not to go forth, at the will of the Goblet. But his parents didn’t know that it was the hand of Fate at work. They only knew that their perfect son, the light of their life, was gone, now and forevermore.

It was bittersweet, she thought, to know that his loss had so affected those he had known, while for those to whom he had been only the Hogwarts Champion, life went on with only the slightest of pauses: a moment of shocked silence in the stands, followed by the murmurs of too-soon, tasteless jokes and hysterical giggles, half-muffled in guilt, or by resigned acknowledgements that they had known the Tournament was deadly before they filed solemnly back to their Houses. People were so delightfully self-centered like that, moving on with their own lives, even in the face of evidence that any of them could be ended in a moment.

The Durmstrangers and Beauxbatonnais, for example, cared nothing for the fate of a single Hogwartian student, Champion or not. They were, or had been, ready to declare war on each other, for they had all seen Krum, a victim himself if she understood those snippets of Young Barty’s confession properly, cast an Unforgivable on Delacour. The sounds of the Durmstrangers turning their ship into a fortress and preparing to retreat had carried across the open grounds without even the aid of wind-scrying.

Neither Karkaroff nor Maxime seemed to care what their students were doing, though Luna had heard a breath or two of Professor McGonagall telling the lot of them off in a flood of French and German, demanding that they keep the peace while they remained on the grounds of _her_ school.

A bitter gust brought the words of the Head Nargle to her ears, wondering where Looney Luna had got off to. She shivered, and not just from the cold. It was just typical that the only people who would care that she had disappeared from Ravenclaw tower were the girls who lived to steal her things and make her life more difficult than necessary.

Still, she put it out of her mind. She was on a mission – self-appointed, of course: the Innocent Power would _never_ advocate for Severus Snape as it had done for Sirius Black – and she would not allow thoughts of what she was _expected_ to be doing to interfere with what she _should_ be doing.

Which was waiting.

Everyone knew, or at least everyone who had lived through the last War, that Severus Snape was a Death Eater and Spy. He had admitted as much in the Trials, the transcripts of which had once been public knowledge.

He had done a good job, Luna thought, of hiding himself away, making the world forget that he was ever anything other than the wretched Potions Master of Hogwarts and the Head of Slytherin House, but if the Thief Lord truly had returned – and that outcome had been almost certain, Fate having agreed over a year prior that he would rise again, the only question the timing – there was only one thing he would be doing tonight.

After all, what good was a double agent if he was not trusted by _both_ of his masters?

And if her father’s stories were true, regaining the trust of his Dark master would be nearly as painful now as gaining the trust of his Light master must have been in the beginning. And far more deadly.

In ten of the twenty futures she had scried for him, Severus Snape vanished tonight, never heard from again. In four, his body was found, days or weeks or months later, horribly mutilated, a message for any who might think to turn coat. Of the six that remained, he was freed to return to the school and take up his old spying post as he could. Only in one would he make it without help.

She was waiting because there were three futures in twenty where she judged her presence might be the difference between his survival, safe return to his rooms, and death or exposure (which was, really, only a slower death), passed out on the grounds.

Not that all of these futures were equally likely. She hadn’t the knowledge of Arithmancy to predict that, yet. Three in twenty might be a fifteen percent chance, but it might be five or fifty, if those three outcomes were less likely or more than the average to occur. But the point remained, she might be needed.

More importantly, in all the futures she had seen looking further afield, seeking series of events where the Thief Lord did not irreparably damage the foundations of Magical Britain, had had much in common. If Severus Snape did not return, or if he did not make it back to the castle, with or without her help, the Thief Lord would destroy their world before he was in turn destroyed.

She wondered if the Spy knew that the fate of Magical Britain rested upon his shoulders. She rather doubted it, but then, it would explain a great deal of his temperament if he did. It must, she thought, be a rather heavy and uncomfortable burden to bear.

She wrapped her cloak more tightly around herself. She knew it would do no good to beg the universe to let this be one of the six futures where the Thief Lord accepted his Spy’s excuses, one of the four where he was not so damaged in the course of proving his loyalty that she could not help him, but she could not help but hope. She did not know whether it would be worse if he never returned, or if it was one of the two paths where he died in her arms, despite her best efforts to save him.

It was difficult, sometimes, knowing of the might-have-beens and might-yet-bes in all their infinite potential. This was the first time, though, that she had been truly scared of the might-yet-bes, and there was nothing she could do to change the path her universe would take, save what she was already doing.

That scared her, too.

She had never acted before to try to change things, unless it was by the command of her Patron.

That she had made the choice to deliberately attempt to affect the likelihood of those three paths coming to fruition, when she could be – was _expected_ to be – safe in her bed in Ravenclaw, or searching the Tower for the latest shoes or books the Nargles had hidden away, or otherwise uninvolved, was terrifying.

She knew now, she thought, how the Headmaster felt, about power and how he was unworthy to wield it.

Everyone’s choices changed the world all the time. She knew that. Her great-grandmother had told her at the age of five, that a single person could change the world – and did, at every moment, the world’s future woven from the consequences of ten hundred thousand million choices made every day by everyone from the lowliest House Elf to the greatest of kings.

But normally… normally those choices were made with no knowledge of their impact, or only the knowledge of the past and the present, not the future. The impact of those who knew the future could be much greater, twisting the design of the Tapestry to their will. And those choices could be dangerous, if they were not careful: she had seen only bits and pieces of the whole – there was no way to ensure that she would not, somehow, bring about an unfavorable outcome due to some factor of which she was completely unaware.

But she had chosen to try anyway.

From what she knew of the past and the present, the futures she had seen were not unlikely.

There could, she knew, be hundreds of paths she had _not_ seen, where the Thief Lord died and her actions this night and those of the Spy in the war to come were irrelevant. Absence of evidence, she reminded herself, was not evidence of absence.

But she did not think she could take that chance, for all she might second-guess herself.

If Severus Snape did not return, of course, her choice would not matter anyway, those of the Thief and the Spy himself taking precedence temporally. But if he did, she would help him, no matter how much it terrified her to act.

Not acting, after all, would be a choice itself.

So it was that she sat and waited, and hoped against the odds (whatever they might be, in truth), that this was one of the universes in which she would have a chance to do so.

The sky was greying and the grounds were cold, by the time Severus Snape dragged himself across the Hogwarts ward line, barely conscious, covered in blood and even less palatable substances, shaking from, she thought, the Cruciatus, but not so badly off as he might have been. She flew to his side and was relieved to see that his wounds were only superficial, for the most part. She did not know enough healing to fix them, but she recognized this as a path where he would have been found, vulnerable and weak, before morning (to what fate depended by whom he was found), rather than one where he would have died from his torture at the Dark Lord’s hands.

She let go a breath she hadn’t realized she had been holding in relief, and charmed the man unnoticeable before carefully levitating him back toward his quarters. The Hospital Wing was out of the question: Madam Pomfrey was a good woman and a good healer, but if Luna was to show up with the Spy in such a state, it would raise questions she was not willing to answer about how she had found him and why. If he was on the brink of death, she would have gone for help, of course, but there was nothing the school Healer would be able to do for the after-effects of the Cruciatus, anyway, and that was the worst of the damage.

The Castle was, she had found, quite good about allowing her to go wherever she so chose, if only she asked politely. The door to the personal chambers of the Head of Slytherin (unsurprisingly Spartan and impersonal, though surprisingly comfortable) opened at her whispered _please_ , and she set to work removing his robes and cleaning his wounds as quickly as she could.

She might not know much about healing, but she _did_ know that he was bound to get an infection of some sort if she simply left him covered in open wounds and filth, and then saving him might have been for naught. But it would hardly do if he woke before she was done and gone. He would probably murder her for having seen him bare and helpless, without his layers of defensive wool and intimidating robes, not to mention for having seen the evidence of the life he had lived to date, his skin a tapestry of scars that she _knew_ he would not want exposed, even if she did not know how to read them.

When she was done, she left him on his sofa, a soft blanket tucked around him, and crossed her fingers that he would not question his state when he awoke. She was far too tired, in any case, to do aught else to hide her assistance, and she didn’t know what he would normally have done, had he managed to make it there himself.

It was not until she was safely back in her bed that she breathed freely once again.

She only hoped that she had done enough.

If she had, they might, now, have a chance.

 


End file.
